This is a good example of why you don’t want to elect a President with Popular votes…..it only takes the large cities to win an election that way. Let’s hope this article is wrong….America can’t stand four more years of this man.

The presidential election battleground has shrunk over the course of the summer as states have begun falling into predictable patterns and campaigns have begun to place their bets for the fall.

The latest updates can be seen in The Times interactive battleground map, which currently shows President Obama ahead in states with 247 electoral votes, while Republican Mitt Romney leads in states with 191. Eight tossup states hold the balance for the 270 electoral votes needed for election. The map allows users to try out different scenarios to predict November’s winner.

Over the last few weeks, despite hopes by Democrats that Arizona might become a swing state, recent polls have shown it clearly leaning toward Romney. Similarly, polls in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Republicans have expressed hopes for, have shown those states leaning toward Obama. Tellingly, neither campaign is currently advertising in those states, with both campaigns recently pulling out of Pennsylvania’s TV markets.

By contrast, advertising has been near saturation levels in the eight states that appear to be genuine tossups: Nevada and Colorado in the West; Iowa and Ohio in the Midwest and industrial belt; New Hampshire; and Virginia, North Carolina and Florida in the South.

Romney will need to win the lion’s share of those states in order to beat Obama, and Republican strategists believe he will gain ground in them during the fall. So far, however, the only tossup state in which he has led in the average of recent public polls is North Carolina.

By contrast, if Obama holds the states in which he currently appears to lead, he could sew up a victory by carrying Florida alone or by winning Ohio and any one of the other tossups or by any one of several combinations involving Virginia.

Recent polling suggests that Obama’s best shots may be in Ohio, where an intensive advertising barrage appears to have done considerable damage to Romney’s image with voters, and in Nevada, where demographic changes, particularly a steady increase in the ranks of Latino voters, have made the state more hospitable to Democrats.

It’s also possible that all or nearly all the tossup states will fall in the same direction. In the most optimistic scenario for Democrats, Obama could end up with 326 or more electoral votes, not as many as he received in 2008, but still a substantial electoral college victory. Scenarios exist in which Romney, too, could break 300, but that would require a significant shift from the current state of the race.

Guess the White House really didn’t want to know our opinions on the TSA….actually I’m sure they know them or they wouldn’t have done this.

At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House “We the People” website. About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the Administration were obtained when the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition. The site also went down for “maintenance” following an article in Wired that sought support for the campaign.

Here’s part of that Wired article:

Court Demands TSA Explain Why It Is Defying Nude Body Scanner Order

Images: TSA

A federal appeals court Wednesday ordered the Transportation Security Administration to explain why it hasn’t complied with the court’s year-old decision demanding the agency hold public hearings concerning the rules and regulations pertaining to the so-called nude body scanners installed in U.S. airport security checkpoints.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s brief order came in response to the third request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center for the court to enforce its order.

A year ago, the circuit court, in a lawsuit brought by EPIC, set aside a constitutional challenge trying to stop the government from using intrusive body scanners across U.S. airports. But the decision on July 15, 2011 also ordered TSA “to act promptly” and hold public hearings and publicly adopt rules and regulations about the scanners’ use, which it has not done.

The public comments and the agency’s answers to them are reviewable by a court — which opens up a new avenue for a legal challenge to the 2009 agency decision to deploy the scanners. Critics maintain the scanners, which use radiation to peer through clothes, are threats to Americans’ privacy and health, which the TSA denies.

You know the atheists have carried this type thing waaay too far. If you use this same type logic….you could say, Do Senior discounts discriminate against younger people? Just more insanity from these type people, which are usually on the left (not always of course)

Last month, I wrote about the Lost Cajun Kitchen, a small, mom-and-pop restaurant located in Pennsylvania. The restaurant made news, because it offered a discount on Sundays to anyone bringing in a church bulletin, and a particular atheist decided to sue them over it. Little did the restaurant owners know just how good that action would be for business!

As I noted in my July 6 posting, “John Wolff, who is an atheist, filed the complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission against Prudhomme’s Lost Cajun Kitchen in Columbia.” Here’s more from the York Daily Record:

Wolff said the practice discriminates against him because he does not attend church.

“I did this not out of spite, but out of a feeling against the prevailing self-righteousness that stems from religion, particularly in Lancaster County,” said Wolff, a retired electrical engineer.

Sharon Prudhomme, one of the co-owners of the restaurant, said she is not discriminating because diners don’t have to actually attend a church or synagogue service to get a bulletin. She said area religious leaders told her that anyone can walk in a religious building and obtain a bulletin, without attending services.

Prudhomme added that she has no intention of changing the discount program, which she created to bring more traffic into her restaurant on a traditionally slow day.

So what happened next? Just like with Chick-fil-A, the attention has resulted in big business for the restaurant. As reported in The Christian Post, “Owner Sharon Prudhomme explained that business has been up and support has poured in from all over the country and even the world.”

“It has definitely picked up,” said Prudhomme to the York Daily Record, adding that “everybody that comes in [offers] a lot of handshakes, hugs. Everybody is offering a lot of support.”

The local newspaper hit the nail on the head with their op-ed about Wolff by writing, “It seems, like so many atheist complaints are designed more to draw attention to oneself than to right a serious constitutional wrong.”

So church folks can come on a Sunday and get a 10 percent discount on their mess of crawfish if they hand over a church bulletin. Big deal.

Restaurants offer all sorts of discounts based on debatable criteria – to senior citizens, to youth sports teams, to people who buy the newspaper and clip out the coupons.

Wolff and the Freedom from Religion Foundation should find something better to do with their time. It seems the more attention they draw to blasting organizations that have Christian principles, the more it helps the organizations. Hmmm… maybe they should keep it up! Chick-fil-A and the Lost Cajun Kitchen seem to be doing just fine.

Of course it has nothing to do with the fact that Nidal Hasan is Muslim and the Skikh temple gunman is white.

(CNSNews.com) – U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, speaking at the Sikh Temple shooting memorial service in Oak Creek, Wis., on Friday, called the tragedy “an act of terrorism, an act of hatred,” and “a hate crime that is anathema to the founding principles of our nation and to who we are as an American people.”

The gunman, identified as Wade Michael Page, shot nine people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin – killing six and injuring three others. Page, a suspected white Supremacist, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police.

“For our nation’s law enforcement community, our resolve to prevent acts of terrorism and to combat crimes motivated by hatred has never been stronger, and that is precisely what happened here – an act of terrorism, an act of hatred, a hate crime that is anathema to the founding principles of our nation and to who we are as an American people,” he said.

Holder said that the Sikh community has been the victims of “this sort of violence” far too often. “In the recent past, too many Sikhs have been targeted and victimized simply because of who they are, how they look and what they believe. That is wrong. It is unacceptable, and it will not be tolerated,” he said.

Mitt Romney announced Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate Saturday, selecting the Republican Party’s go-to man on budget issues in a decision that signals the campaign will make the nation’s spiraling debt a centerpiece of its attacks on President Obama.

Romney made the selection official during a campaign stop Saturday morning in Norfolk, Va., before launching a four-day bus tour.

The Republican presidential candidate called his new running mate a man of “steadiness” and “integrity.” Speaking Saturday morning, Romney praised Ryan as an “intellectual leader” of the party, one who understands the toll the debt is taking on the country but is optimistic about the future.

“He doesn’t demonize his opponents. He understands that honorable people can have honest differences and he appeals to the better angels of our nature,” Romney said. “He’s never been content to just curse the darkness. He’d rather light candles.”

To the backdrop of retired battleship USS Wisconsin, an energized Ryan then riled up the crowd with a feisty speech that promoted Romney as the solution to the problems under President Obama. Ryan, met with chants of “USA, USA,” gave a sweeping vision speech on free enterprise, one laced with attacks on the White House incumbent.

“No one disputes that President Obama inherited a difficult situation. And, in his first two years, with his party in complete control of Washington, he passed nearly every item on his agenda. But that didn’t make things better,” Ryan said. “In fact, we find ourselves in a nation facing debt, doubt and despair. …

“Whatever the explanations, whatever the excuses, this is a record of failure.”

Ryan accused the Obama team of being “more worried about their next election than they are about the next generation,” and pledged a Romney-Ryan ticket would “lead” through the tough issues and correct course.